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The Examined Life was an immediate best-seller upon first publication in Great Britain. A reviewer for the Sunday Times, Robert Collins (2013), said of it that “Grosz's vignettes are so brilliantly put together that they read like pieces of bare, illuminating fiction.” Andrew Solomon , in another blurb on the book jacket, is quoted as saying “impossible to put down.” When first I began to read, I found it quite possible to put down. After the first 30 or so pages, I threw it aside, baffled and irritated.
The next morning I looked up reviews of the American edition. The first to come up was by the New York Times reviewer, Michiko Kakutani, who is the most intelligent and judicious journalistic reviewer I know of. She, too, praised the book, as “an insightful and beautifully written book about the process of psychoanalysis, and the ways people's efforts to connect the past, present and future reflect their capacity to change.” Dutifully, I picked the book up again, and began reading from where I had left off. This time, I couldn't and didn't put it down. And still, for some reason, I resisted writing this review.
Weeks later, when I was ready to write, I reread the book from the beginning. Again, it was a breeze, except for one thing. I discovered why I had thought at first that I hated the book. The book's first story, the one had that caused me to throw the thing aside, is tellingly called “How we can be possessed by a story